


Blackbird

by Senket



Series: The Winning Scenario [3]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Child Kirk, Gen, Tarsus IV, is 'tarsus iv' not 'enough said'?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 19:45:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4112731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senket/pseuds/Senket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time rescue comes to the destroyed colony on Tarsus IV, James Kirk has become less human and more animal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blackbird

_“Blackbird singing in the dead of night”_

 Jim- James, Kirk, #3584  _green list_ , whatever he had become- slunk through the shadows. Eyes too big, too glassy, too blue to be unrecognizable, glittered in the darkness, sparked by reflections of faraway flames. He moved slowly, bones groaning in his too-thin body. They wouldn’t notice him if there was anyone around to notice him. His skin was darkened by smears of wet dirt, smelling of it, his hair matted against his skull in knobby tangles. A rough gust of wind tore through his ratty clothes, whistling between slats of the abandoned makeshift-town; he didn’t shiver. He had no energy for that, no patience for it. His limbs prickled with numbness, nerves misfiring. Even the hunger had gone, a black tar unrecognizable from the swirl of pitch that settled and hardened in his gut.

He moved closer towards the fire, inch by inch, though it was a forest away. He was too far to smell the smoke. A blessing, really. He’d discovered, in the last few weeks, that the burn of wood, the burn of synthetics and the burn of flesh all had very different scents. The last didn’t make him wretch anymore, at least, and in some way that was progress. He’d have to get closer if he intended to live through the night- at this point it was all left to drive him, a chant burning in the back of his head where there was no other sound (but the sound of a scream so constant he could no longer recognize it, on and on and on and on and on)

_Survive_

Like a wild animal, shifting slowly through the darkness, eyes too big and too empty, skin taut over bone, scavenging for food in the half-light of dawn and scurrying, frightened, under a rock at the garbled of a language he had once spoken. A language that had left his tongue, lost meaning in the loneliness of a dried-up world with searing wounds and a fungus spreading into everything, everyone, clogging up hearts and throats and filling mouths with nonsense. He understood the bleats of the dying and the sobs of fear and nothing else, nothing except that word that lost all meaning and all shape but pushed him  _forward forward back left under forward._

_Survive_

He ate roots dug up with blunted fingers and leaves that would make him sick in the morning, slunk like a spider (all bony limbs and belly close to the ground) back under the shaking foundation of a shanty house with a collapsed wall. If strangers came through they’d shake up the empty town for anything of worth (there was nothing) but they’d never check here— this place where no human being would hide, this hole for snakes and rodents. He curled in on his carcass, nose tucked against a sharp knee, arms like vices around his own legs.

He woke to a highpitched sound, sunlight white and sharp, bleaching the bones of the empty town. Trampling, shaking earth, authoritarian shouts that meant nothing to him except  _stay, stay where you are where no one can see you if you run they shoot you in the back_ ** _stay_** the solid boom of people in control  ~~there was no such thing, he knew, he _knew_  that now the universe did what it wanted and you took its blows or died twisted and bleeding  _he knew._~~  But they were smart, not like the puppetry driven by screaming angry fear, looking and searching and documenting and using sensors that went  _something’s alive here something’s hiding something’s here_  and the machine said that something was sentient but it was wrong because that something ate leaves that made it sick and ate roots that were nothing but something to chew on and that something hid under houses like a rodent, that something with dirt rough in its skin and spider limbs, that something with eyes too blue to not be recognized and that something with eyes too glassy to bear recognition and rage, festering and blackened, overpowered by the bone-whiteness of nothingleft. _  
_

The first thing anyone did when they found him was take  _an image_ , a picture of blazing blue, too big, too glassy, electric-storm eyes staring out from the blackness of the underneath, shocking the retina into seeing nothing but white. By the time hands found him, the prickling under his skin, under the crust of mud and illness, had already needled the impression of emptiness too deep into his skin to be forgotten.


End file.
